International Literacy Day 8 September, 2021
Despite progress made since the inception of International Literacy Day in 1967, literacy challenges persist with at least 773 million young people and adults across the world still not having basic literacy skills. At Moodle, we have always supported the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights that everyone has the right to education and the UN Sustainable Development Goal to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. That is why Moodle uses the characteristics of the Internet to take education beyond physical classrooms that have barely changed in hundreds of years, and to enable quality education in all corners of the globe.
Moodle LMS, the heart of the Moodle ecosystem used by hundreds of millions of learners worldwide, is, and will always remain, open source. This means that Moodle follows the four open source freedoms. It is licensed in a way that allows anyone to download the entire software for free; it enables educators, developers and organisations in any location in the world to share knowledge, change and adapt the Moodle software to the way they need it to work; and collectively contributes to continually improving Moodle for educators and learners across the world. We believe this kind of freedom in education technology is fundamental to allowing education to flourish and grow in a more equitable and accessible way.
Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we have celebrated the many schools, vocational providers and universities that have embraced embarking on, or improving, their online delivery platforms. However, we recognise that this has also highlighted a divide in terms of connectivity, infrastructure, electricity and the ability to engage with technology. Without this critical interplay between access to, and understanding of technology, the 773 million non-literate young people and adults will be disproportionately affected.
We encourage all members of our global Moodle community – educators, developers, systems administrators, managers and learners – to celebrate, promote and share the theme of International Literacy Day 2021 “Literacy for a human-centred recovery: Narrowing the digital divide.”
You can do this by sharing UNESCO’s International Literacy Day campaign and celebrations around the world including their live events on 8 September – English, French, Spanish and 9 September – – English, French, Spanish
It is in coming together to advocate for inclusive technology-enabled learning that we continue to strive toward our mission to empower educators to improve our world.
